Explosion. I am beginning to think there is some kind of a Natural Cosmic Calendar. If we
guess at what the pattern is here we might guess after the dinosaurs went extinct and
mammals could evolve towards humans, then the next term in our equation might be . In
which case we have:!
!
=20+3+0.57735+0.4714=24.04875 hours!
Is exactly the length of the Earth day in present times to one place after the decimal.!
Can we go back in our cosmic calendar to periods before the Cambrian explosion. 65 million
years ago of course is not a precise date for the very day on which an asteroid hit earth
bringing about the extinction of dinosaurs, but given the vast expanse of time we are working
with percentage-wise that estimate is very good for our purposes. Our calendar starts at the
Cambrian explosion. What major event existed before that? It would seem about 2 billion years
ago plants and plankton came into extraordinary abundance, and these photosynthesizers
converted the primordial CO2 in the atmosphere, making it into oxygen, which they continue to
do to this day. As a result, about two billion years ago the Earth atmosphere was converted to
one having a high percentage of oxygen gas (O2). Thus a new kind of organism came into
existence, one that gets its energy from food by burning it in oxygen.!
Today many organisms use copper (Cu2++) for its metabolism because it is much more soluble
than iron in its reduced state. Iron is quickly oxidized to its ferric state and in this state is
extremely insoluble. Thus, before the oxygen rich atmosphere, organisms could use iron.!
The interesting thing is we don’t have to look just at the paleontological record to ascertain the
history of life life on Earth, we can find the metabolic pathways common to all life today and we
have found in common all life has certain things. We have found one of those things is an iron-
based metabolism. Thus we have a way of finding when the common ancestor to all life
existed. We call her LUCA. Since she had an Iron based metabolism she existed at least before
the explosion of photosynthesizes, which means she is at least 2 billion years old. But we have
a fossil record that goes back 3.5 billion years for the first life, and everyday that keeps getting
pushed back, even to 4 billion years, or more. The Earth and Sun formed about 5 billion years
ago.!
So we may not have the data to take our calendar back to a date for LUCA. But perhaps we
can call 2 billion years accurate for the explosion of photosynthesizers and the arrival of an
oxygen-rich atmosphere.!